Molly Oswaks

Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz, students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, built the Super Angry Birds desktop slingshot controller as project for their Haptic (tactile feedback) technology class.

With a hacked motorized fader (the kind found in audio mixing consoles) to create forced feedback, an Arduino-based microcontroller called Music & Motors developed at the CIID, and a programming in Max/MSP and Arduino, the real-life bird-slinger mimics exactly the tension and toss of the wildly popular Rovio game. They even built a custom TNT box for the birds whose abilities are amplified in the game when triggered by such a device.

Basically, the way we achieved this is by drawing a force curve and storing the values in a table, then we send the current position of the slider through the table and extract the value to send to the motor that applies an opposing force.

The final product is impressively polished-looking. Funny how playing a virtual computer game seems so much cooler with tactile parts. [SoundPlusDesign, GizMag]